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Category Archives: Ustream in the News

The use of video by organizations for marketing, communications, training and education continues to grow. Leading publications are turning to Ustream and its experts for insights and best practices.

Check out the latest articles highlighting Ustream on a diverse range of subjects:

Digital Trends, “Stargaze in Glorious UHD with NASA’s Upcoming 4K Network,“September 14, 2015In announcing NASA’s new 4K Ultra High Definition (UHD) channel, Digital Trends writer Adam Poltrack noted that 57 million users have logged on to the International Space Station feed on Ustream — a testament to the popularity of NASA’s footage.

Streaming Media, “Teradek Announces VidiU Pro for High-Bandwidth Streaming,” September 1, 2015Troy Dreier covered Teradek’s release of the VidiU Pro to complement its VidiU and VidiU Mini on-camera encoding and uploading devices. The new technology is compatible with several live broadcasting platforms, including Ustream.

CNET, “Will gaming breathe life into live-streaming YouTube?,” August 27, 2015With the announcement of YouTube Gaming, CNET Digital Media contributor Joan E. Solsman explored whether the new feature will strengthen YouTube’s share of the live streaming video market. Among the experts consulted for their insights was Ustream CEO Brand Hunstable.

Bloomberg News, “The Media Landscape: Are More Partnerships in Store?,” August 18, 2015In this Bloomberg News video, Ustream CEO Brad Hunstable and Revolt Media CEO Keith Clinkscales reacted to NBC Universal’s $200 million investment in Buzzfeed and the deal’s implications for the future of media partnerships.

CIO Review, “6 tips for pivoting your business,” August 17, 2015CIO Review‘s Jennifer Lonoff Schiff asked key business experts — including Ustream CEO Brad Hunstable — to offer their advice on how to tell whether it’s time for your business to make a shift.

San Francisco Chronicle, “Ustream settles in with TechCrunch, Adobe in SoMa tech hub,” August 15, 2015San Francisco Chronicle‘s Julie Balise took readers on a virtual tour of Ustream’s San Francisco headquarters in an historic building that was once home to Macromedia, Eventbrite, Zendesk and Yammer.

Wall Street Journal, “Twitter, Facebook Flex Live Video Muscles,” August 14, 2015In her coverage of Facebook’s and Twitter’s forays into the live video arena, WSJ‘s Cat Zakrzewski noted that Ustream powers many of Facebook’s live events, including the Game of Thrones season premiere.

CIO Review, “Is Your CDN Strategy the Elephant in the Room?” by Arpad Kun (page 20), July 30, 2015How can a CIO address the demand for more high-resolution, high-bitrate video without stressing the company’s servers to the breaking point? Ustream’s own Director of Network Operations, Arpad Kun, shared his insights on this question in the July issue of CIO Review.

For the 28th year in a row, viewers around the world are tuning in for Shark Week, Discovery’s annual event celebrating one of the ocean’s most fascinating creatures.

While live video has been a part of the Shark Week festivities for several years — last year’s streams attracted more than 67,000 unique viewers — Ustream is adding a new dimension to this year’s event.

“Shark-lovers this year can tune into the live camera at the National Aquarium’s Blacktip Reef Shark tank,” writes The Washington Post‘s Hayley Tsukayama, “not only to watch the sharks swim, but also to chat live with scheduled experts who will be fielding questions underwater.”

This event is the latest evidence of a broadening of the media experience beyond traditional channels. In engaging with brands, today’s audiences enjoy — and expect — real-time digital interactions, including social media as well as live streaming video.

In a chat with CEO Brad Hunstable, Tsukayama highlighted Ustream’s partnerships not only with media companies like Discovery, but also enterprises such as Intuit and Home Depot. “With our company,” Hunstable said, “a significant portion of it comes from enterprises.”

In an interview on Bloomberg Business’ “Market Makers,” Ustream CEO Brad Hunstable shared some thoughts on Verizon’s $4.4 billion acquisition of AOL and the deal’s implications for the streaming video industry. (Watch the video here.)

“AOL is in a more stable position than it may have been previously,” Hunstable said. “They’ve been deliberately going into mobile, they’ve been deliberately going into video, and for companies like us, who partner with AOL, it’s a good thing.”

When asked about where the opportunities lie in the streaming video industry, Hunstable added, “For us, it’s really the enterprise space. We’re really focused on the business market, the B2B market. That’s where our growth is — companies like Salesforce, Cisco, Facebook, these are our customers. We’re helping businesses use video to connect in more engaging ways.”

Recently HuffPost Live host Caroline Modarressy-Tehrani sat down with Ustream CEO Brad Hunstable to discuss his take on issues such as the growing buzz around mobile streaming apps and the rise of citizen journalism. (Watch the video here; the interview begins just after the 21-minute mark.)

On the latest mobile streaming apps

Hunstable sees the popularity of new mobile streaming apps as a testament to the growing significance of video and the power it places in the hands of mobile users. “It’s another data point for how hot video is,” he remarked. “If you think about it right now, everyone’s carrying around a satellite truck in their pocket.”

On the responsibilities of citizen journalists

“One of the things that video brings — particularly live video — is some element of transparency,” Hunstable told Modarressy, “but it needs balance. It needs context.”

Recalling Ustream’s role in bringing global attention to uprisings in Russia and the Ukraine in recent years, he noted that “getting that unfiltered, that real-time access to what is happening is not a bad thing.” At the same time, “you need to get all the other facts that are associated with [the issue].”

On Ustream’s biggest moment so far

When Modarressy asked Hunstable what was, in his opinion, the most powerful use of Ustream to date, the self-proclaimed “space junkie” cited the Mars rover landing. “To be able to watch that moment and experience it — there were millions and millions of people watching it,” he said. “To experience this collective consciousness of people watching us visiting another planet was absolutely exciting and powerful.”

Writer Kimberlee Morrison noted that Ustream has been providing streaming video since 2007 and has now evolved past the consumer phase to focus on the needs of enterprises. Ustream CEO Brad Hunstable commented that the recent buzz over new apps simply highlights the growing popularity of online video. “In a lot of ways,” he told Morrison, “the Internet is becoming video.”

Hunstable also commented that, while newer apps offer integration with social platforms, they lack the analytics that companies need to attain real business goals. “Ustream,” on the other hand, “is building capabilities for brands to be media companies in their own right.”

In the recent article “Meerkat, Periscope, Been There, Done That,” Bloomberg Business contributor Olga Kharif reminded readers that new apps Meerkat and Periscope are not the first tools to enable live video streaming from smartphones — far from it.

While the new apps have attracted considerable buzz, both in the media and among consumers, Ustream ranks among the “pioneers” of streaming video, dating back to 2007. And while newcomers focus on consumers, CEO Brad Hunstable points out that Ustream has evolved to a new level, offering a secure, high-performance tool to help enterprises reach customers and employees.

Ustream has earned a reputation for being able to accommodate some of the world’s largest streaming events with as many as 1 million concurrent viewers and 14 million total viewers during large events and regularly hosts 70 million viewers per month. And, while that alone is impressive, what’s more interesting is that Ustream has developed technology that meet the needs when audiences start quickly, grow quickly and then leave once the live event is over.

Live mobile broadcasting was one of the hottest topics at last week’s South by Southwest event. And while live video — even mobile live video — is nothing new, conversations around its applications are springing up in several sectors, including politics.

Some pundits are holding up the latest mobile streaming video apps as political game-changers as the 2016 election season approaches. Are they right?

Not quite, says Matt Browner Hamlin in a recent article on Medium. Smart campaigners have actually been leveraging the power of live video streaming since the very beginning. Hamlin goes on to describe how he, as deputy Internet director for Christopher Dodd’s campaign way back in in 2007, Ustreamed speeches and Q&A sessions:

People following the presidential primary were able to engage in the same dialogue with a candidate as residents of the early states. Using UStream’s embedded chat functionality, as well as monitoring comments on the sites where our streams were embedded, we were able to bring in questions from people across the country into Dodd’s Q&A sessions with voters in New Hampshire and caucus-goers in Iowa.

If you kept up with some of the discussions at South by Southwest (SXSW) this past week, you surely noticed a lot of buzz around live streaming video from mobile devices. And while some are talking about mobile streaming like it’s cutting-edge stuff, you might be surprised to learn that Ustream has been doing this for years.

Back in 2009, Ustream introduced the world’s first mobile app capable of streaming live video from the iPhone to the Internet. Almost six years later, it seems the rest of the world is finally catching up.

Since its introduction, Ustream Live Broadcaster has seen more than 15 million downloads and last year, Ustream delivered more than 75 million mobile live broadcasts.

And yes, he thinks casual mobile live streaming is here to stay. “It’s a different thing, like Vine versus YouTube,” he said of the difference between Meerkat and Ustream. In his view, Meerkat will bring attention to live streaming and lower the barrier to people creating videos themselves, and that will benefit the whole sector. Between the coming 5G mobile data networks and cameras that can shoot 1080p video, he said, “there are a lot of very natural forces that are pushing this industry toward an explosion.”

So while a couple tiny startups ride the media wave from SXSW, we’ll continue to innovate on the proven, technology platform that started it all. As noted in last week’s NPR All Tech Considered article by Tajha Chappallet-Lanier, we’re delivering video solutions highly tailored to the needs of marketers, executives, HR professionals, and professional broadcasters. And, we’ll adding powerful, enterprise-class features like security, SD-CDN, eCDN and SSO that enable organizations to use business-ready video solutions.

When the New England Patriots squared off against the Seattle Seahawks in Super Bowl XLIV, more than 1.3 million people experienced the event through NBC’s live streaming video — a 50 percent increase over last year’s online viewership.

According to NBC’s press release, the stream also set Super Bowl records for average viewers per minute (800,000), concurrent users (1.3 million) and total minutes (213 million).

While it was an impressive achievement for live streaming video, it was not without its challenges. As the game progressed, the overwhelming demand resulted in some online viewers experiencing time delays and other technical difficulties.

“NBC is great at streaming live events,” Ustream CTO Gyula Feher told The Daily Dot in an interview regarding the event. “They were the first to stream the Super Bowl in 2012. And, the Super Bowl is the ‘Everest’ of live events: Let’s remember that Super Bowl XLVIII was the most watched television event ever. It’s likely that the peak load on the NBC livestream was similarly record-breaking.”

One of the biggest challenges in streaming a live event, however, is anticipating the bandwidth required, which can vary dramatically from one minute to the next. For example, during Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference, the streams of keynote speeches by CEO Mark Benioff and Hilary Clinton drew record-setting audiences.

One way Ustream has addressed this challenge of being able to scale and anticipate required bandwidth is through a unique technology we developed called Software Defined content delivery network (CDN), or SD-CDN.

SD-CDN provides the ability to scale automatically without manual provisioning of resources, dynamically adding and removing edges and providers as demand requires. The system can leverage a combination of edge resources (e.g. CDN providers, transit lines, peering and ad-hoc edges, etc.) and instantly route traffic among those sources as needed. A built-in monitoring system evaluates in real time the performance and efficacy of each source and can make automatic adjustments as changing conditions require.

What does all this mean for the individual viewer? The best possible quality from beginning to end — and the ability to pre-empt issues that could disrupt the viewing experience.